Colombian actor Andrés Parra plays Hugo Chávez in El Comandante, a Spanish-language TV series that will premiere throughout Latin America this week. The show will not be shown in Venezuela.
Photograph: Fernando Vergara/AP

The revolution will now be televised.

The life of Hugo Chávez, who mesmerized Venezuela’s impoverished masses before dying of cancer in 2013, is being dramatized in a Spanish-language TV series that is generating a backlash even before it airs.

Produced by Sony Pictures Television, El Comandante premieres this week throughout Latin America and in the spring will be broadcast in the US by the Telemundo network.

Conceived by a staunch Chávez critic, the 60-episode series aims to retell the leftist leader’s improbable rise to power from his roots in poor, rural Venezuela while showing how the former tank commander’s authoritarianism laid the groundwork for the country’s current economic mess.

Former Venezuelan trade minister Moisés Naim said he came up with the idea after spending years trying to explain Chávez’s hold over Venezuelans to friends in Washington, where he now lives.

“There are two things nobody can dispute regardless of ideology: the first is that Chávez was an extraordinarily charismatic politician who seduced people all over the world, and the other is that Venezuela today has been destroyed by a major crisis,” said Naim. “It’s very hard to argue the current tragedy has nothing to do with Hugo Chávez.”

Many of Chavez’s achievements and failures during 14 years in power are already well-known. It would be hard to find a world leader who spent more time in front of the camera, making his presidency something of a performance.

Venezuelan co-director Henry Rivero said that to make the series more entertaining and less like a documentary it was necessary to speculate about what happened when the cameras weren’t rolling.

At the Bogotá studio where the series is being filmed, the Colombian actor Andrés Parra, playing Chávez, lit a cigarette and leaned over to an aide to confide his plans for a constitutional referendum that would let him run for re-election indefinitely.

“We’re talking about changing everything, going from capitalism to socialism,” says the fictional Chávez, who was never seen smoking in public.

To be sure, this non-sanctioned retelling of Chávez’s life has drawn fire.

In a state of the nation speech this month, President Nicolás Maduro denounced the series as imperialist “trash”. Chávez’s ex-wife has threatened legal action against Sony.

Diosdado Cabello, leader of the ruling socialist party, has said that casting Parra, who previously played cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar, to depict Chávez is part of a rightwing, foreign-backed effort to tarnish the leader’s image.

“They attacked him when he was alive and now he’s not physically with us,” Cabello said last week, urging government supporters to erect signs on buildings and in work places that read: “Here we don’t talk bad of Chávez.”

On Sunday, Venezuela’s culture minister, Adan Chávez, a brother of the late president, said that shooting would soon start on a Venezuelan-Cuban co-production about Chávez’s life tentatively being called The True Chávez.

Venezuela’s divisive politics aside, playing such a complex individual so fresh in people’s memory is a dream, said Parra.

Before filming, the actor spends two hours getting fitted with a curly-haired wig, prosthetic double chin and skin-darkening makeup. He has worked with a voice coach for more than a year, spending hundreds of hours watching Chávez’s marathon speeches on YouTube to mimic his high-pitched laugh and use of his left hand.

“The charisma Chávez had isn’t something you can learn,” said Parra, who greets visitors to the set with a wide smile and hand raised high in the style of the late populist leader.

The show won’t be broadcast in Venezuela because Sony didn’t license the rights in the country. The fact it won’t be seen there saddens Rivero, who said he thinks his compatriots could benefit from another look at recent history. He said when the project began he spent days in tears remembering the revolution’s painful milestones, like the protests that preceded a 2002 coup attempt.

That so many Chávez allies have dismissed the series without seeing it shows how insecure they are about his legacy, Parra said.

“Maybe it’s because they know the truth,” he said. “Or maybe it’s because through a TV series we have shown blemishes, or recreated situations, in which the image of the human being Hugo Chávez they wanted to construct doesn’t stand so tall.”